Fang Taozi, 20, is a small-town girl who moves to the big city to chase a modelling dream. Her show, The Laid-off Girl, landed on Chinese screens in June. Within weeks, it crossed 200 million views. Her account pulled in more than 400,000 followers. Brands started paying her to sell things.
One catch. Fang Taozi is not real. She is made entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).
And she now charges more per advert than some human influencers with millions of followers. Reports put her rate at around 250,000 yuan a clip. That is about US$38,000 for someone who does not exist.
Sit with that for a moment. The strange part is not that she is fake. It is why she works.
Most fake faces fail. They look too perfect, and something in us senses the lie.
Fang’s makers went the other way. They gave her pores. Blemishes. Wrinkles. Her make-up smudges after a long day. She sweats on the stairs. She gets tired. She makes mistakes.
They built her to be flawed. And those flaws are exactly why people believed her. One viewer said she felt so real that he now accepts AI can replace human actors.
This is not really a technology story. It is a psychology story.
We bond through imperfection. A friend’s small flaws are what make them ours. We trust the person who admits a weakness. We are wary of the one who never has any. That instinct kept us safe throughout human history, because only real people had real flaws.
Fang Taozi is where that stopped being true. Her weaknesses were designed. Her bad days were scripted. The closeness is manufactured. And it still works.
Why should we in Southeast Asia care? Three plain reasons.
First, we are the perfect audience. Southeast Asia is young. We are almost always online. Much of what we watch already comes from somewhere else, dubbed or subtitled. A synthetic star needs no visa, salary or rest day. She can be copied, localised and multiplied. If the sums work in China, she will reach our feeds soon enough.
Second, a character who does not exist now out-earns a real one. That is the market making its choice. And that choice quietly reshapes an entire industry. In China, reports say AI now fills a large and fast-growing share of short-drama production. Somewhere in that shift is a real actor who went months without a job. Now picture that across our region, where creative work is one of the few ladders a young person can still climb.
Third, and this is the quiet one, our feelings are being outsourced. Buying a product made by a machine is one thing. Giving our affection to one is another. Our late-night loyalty. Our sense of connection. All handed to a character built and owned by someone else, tuned to hold us and aimed at our wallets. The bond is real. The thing we bond with was built to produce exactly that bond.
So what is the lesson?
Not fear. And not a ban we could never enforce. The lesson is simpler. Grow up fast about what we are looking at.
Three things would help.
First, tell us what is real. If a face is synthetic, say so. Plainly. At the point we see it, not buried in a caption.
Malaysia already polices online harm under the Online Safety Act. We have already blocked one AI tool for churning out harmful fakes. A clear rule that synthetic performers must be labelled as synthetic is a small next step – and one we could lead on.
Second, teach this like road safety. A child who knows a feed is engineered, and that a beloved character may be a product with a sales target, is far harder to fool. This belongs in our schools now. Not in five years.
Third, build, do not just watch. The same tools that made Fang Taozi are open to our own storytellers. So here is the choice. Does Southeast Asia become a market for synthetic stars made elsewhere? Or a maker of its own? In one future, the money and jobs go overseas. In the other, they stay with our own studios and actors.
There is something almost tender in why she succeeded. Her makers understood that we do not fall for perfection. We fall for tired eyes. Smudged make-up. The honest mistake. They studied our humanity closely enough to counterfeit it.
That is the real headline. Not that a machine can look like us. That it has learned what moves us – and can sell it back to us now, one flawed, lovable face at a time.
The least we can do is watch with our eyes open.
Ts Dr Manju Appathurai holds dual PhDs in Artificial Intelligence (2026) and Crisis Economics, is a licensed clinical psychologist and Licensed Technologist (Ts), and is the founding principal of Mahat Advisory and a strategic adviser to the Dutch Coalition for Defence and Security (Malaysia).
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.
